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INTRODUCING RUDOLF STEINER
by Owen Barfield
Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27, 1861 in Kraljevec (in former Yugoslavia) the son of a minor railway official. At the age of eighteen he entered the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, where he studied mathematics, science, literature, philosophy and history, developing a special interest in Goethe. Three years later, still in Vienna, he was employed to edit Goethe’s scientific writings for Kuerschners Nationalliteratur; from 1890 to 1897, at the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar, he was engaged editing, for another edition of the Collected-Works, virtually the whole of Goethe’s scientific writings published and unpublished. His autobiography tells how at this time he enjoyed the friendship of a number of eminent men, such as Ernst Haeckel, the dogmatic exponent of Darwinian evolution, and Hermann Grimm, the historian. It was during this period also that he took his PhD at Rostock University with a dissertation later to be revised and published under the title Wahrheit und Wissenschaft (Truth and Science).
During the next four years Steiner became deeply involved in the intellectual life — literary and dramatic societies and periodicals and so forth — of Berlin, while at the same time he began his lifelong lecturing activity by giving courses of lectures
under the auspices of the Workers Education Movement.
It was not till the turn of the century that his true genius, unable to find expression through any of these outlets, but which had been steadily maturing within him, first came forth into the light. The historical moment was that one in which the western mind had reached the lowest depths of materialism, and there were few who would even listen to what he had to say. Outstanding among those few were the members of the Theosophical Society, who were in the act of founding a German Section. Steiner joined it, became its president (making the condition that he would be free to propound the results of his own spiritual research whether or not they accorded with the tenets of the Society) and remained with it for some years, until the sensationalism and triviality which he felt was corroding the sound impulse that had led to the Society’s foundation obliged him to separate himself from it altogether.
The next ten years of his life are best seen as the first phase of the anthroposophical movement, and in 1913 the Society bearing that name was founded by his followers in Munich, where his four Mystery Plays were later to be written and produced. There is not space here to deal with the distinction between that and the General Anthroposophical Society, which he himself founded in December 1923, a little more than two years before his death on the 30th of March 1925. Suffice it to say that from 1902 to the end of his life he devoted all his energies (writing some forty books and delivering not less than six thousand lectures) to the cultivation and dissemination of Anthroposophy — to which he hoped would become the germ of a worldwide community of human souls.
So much for externals. As to the substance of his teachings and his life I cannot see him otherwise than as a key figure — perhaps on the human level, the key figure — in the painful transition of humanity from what I have ventured to call original participation to final participation. The crucial phase in that transition was, and indeed is, modem man’s inveterate habit of experiencing matter devoid of spirit, and consequently of conceiving spirit as less real, and finally as altogether unreal. That experience, for good and ill, lies at the foundation of contemporary science and technology, and is daily confirmed and ingrained

INTRODUCING RUDOLF STEINER
by Owen Barfield
Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27, 1861 in Kraljevec (in former Yugoslavia) the son of a minor railway official. At the age of eighteen he entered the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, where he studied mathematics, science, literature, philosophy and history, developing a special interest in Goethe. Three years later, still in Vienna, he was employed to edit Goethe’s scientific writings for Kuerschners Nationalliteratur; from 1890 to 1897, at the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar, he was engaged editing, for another edition of the Collected-Works, virtually the whole of Goethe’s scientific writings published and unpublished. His autobiography tells how at this time he enjoyed the friendship of a number of eminent men, such as Ernst Haeckel, the dogmatic exponent of Darwinian evolution, and Hermann Grimm, the historian. It was during this period also that he took his PhD at Rostock University with a dissertation later to be revised and published under the title Wahrheit und Wissenschaft (Truth and Science).
During the next four years Steiner became deeply involved in the intellectual life — literary and dramatic societies and periodicals and so forth — of Berlin, while at the same time he began his lifelong lecturing activity by giving courses of lectures
under the auspices of the Workers Education Movement.
It was not till the turn of the century that his true genius, unable to find expression through any of these outlets, but which had been steadily maturing within him, first came forth into the light. The historical moment was that one in which the western mind had reached the lowest depths of materialism, and there were few who would even listen to what he had to say. Outstanding among those few were the members of the Theosophical Society, who were in the act of founding a German Section. Steiner joined it, became its president (making the condition that he would be free to propound the results of his own spiritual research whether or not they accorded with the tenets of the Society) and remained with it for some years, until the sensationalism and triviality which he felt was corroding the sound impulse that had led to the Society’s foundation obliged him to separate himself from it altogether.
The next ten years of his life are best seen as the first phase of the anthroposophical movement, and in 1913 the Society bearing that name was founded by his followers in Munich, where his four Mystery Plays were later to be written and produced. There is not space here to deal with the distinction between that and the General Anthroposophical Society, which he himself founded in December 1923, a little more than two years before his death on the 30th of March 1925. Suffice it to say that from 1902 to the end of his life he devoted all his energies (writing some forty books and delivering not less than six thousand lectures) to the cultivation and dissemination of Anthroposophy — to which he hoped would become the germ of a worldwide community of human souls.
So much for externals. As to the substance of his teachings and his life I cannot see him otherwise than as a key figure — perhaps on the human level, the key figure — in the painful transition of humanity from what I have ventured to call original participation to final participation. The crucial phase in that transition was, and indeed is, modem man’s inveterate habit of experiencing matter devoid of spirit, and consequently of conceiving spirit as less real, and finally as altogether unreal. That experience, for good and ill, lies at the foundation of contemporary science and technology, and is daily confirmed and ingrained